The whistleblower

Hurtgen filed an ethics complaint against her boss at Monona Terrace, Gregg McManners, alleging that he violated numerous city policies and regulations. Hurtgen, who is associate director of finance and operations at the convention center, claims that McManners had routinely circumvented the city’s rules on bidding for competitive projects, including requirements for contractors to have an affirmative action plan in place. She also alleged that Monona Terrace had improperly been holding the checkbook for the Friends of Monona Terrace, a nonprofit group set up to support the center.

Hurtgen says she’d been repeatedly raising alarms about these matters, not just to McManners, but to other city departments, including purchasing, human resources and civil rights. In fact, it was the civil rights department that suggested she file an ethics complaint against McManners and gave her the form to fill out.

She agonized over whether to file a complaint, and contemplated finding another job. But then she thought about the training she does for other employees on harassment issues. “I teach this and if I can’t do it myself when the time is right, how can I ask someone who is not in an associate director position to do it?”

And then she waited. And waited. By August, Hurtgen had yet to hear back about her complaint, she says. Emails to a Common Council member and the city attorney’s office finally got her case on the the Sept. 1 Ethics Board agenda.

But that board spent two meetings debating whether it has jurisdiction to hear the case. At the second of those meetings on Sept. 22, the board decided to ask the human resources, civil rights, and finance departments — the same ones Hurtgen says she had already made her concerns known to — to weigh in on the complaint. None of those departments’ investigations found McManners at fault. Neither did an investigation ordered by Mayor Paul Soglin and conducted by city attorney Mike May.

Surprisingly, Hurtgen was never interviewed by any of the investigators.

Hurtgen hopes she’ll finally get a chance to explain her concerns when the Ethics Board once again considers her complaint on Oct. 25 But she’s losing faith that anyone in city government will listen.

“I don’t feel that the truth will ever come out,” she says. “I have evidence that didn’t get a chance to be heard.”

Hurtgen began working at Monona Terrace in 2007 as finance director. In 2011, she was promoted to associate director. Before 2007, she’d worked in health care, always in accounting and information technology roles.

“I’m a curious person,” she says. “Accounting is not super exciting, but I like the IT side of it, the quality-control side of it.”

She says she’s done a number of things to help save Monona Terrace — and the city — money. For instance, in restructuring overtime payments to Monona Terrace staff in 2008, she saved the city $80,000. In 2014, she realized that instead of paying a contractor to plow Monona Terrace’s parking areas, it could use its own truck, which has a plow. This saved the city $12,000.

Starting in 2014, Hurtgen notes in an Oct. 3 affidavit submitted to the city, she noticed “a pattern of violations with the Madison ordinances, city policies and even state law within Monona Terrace, and in particular by McManners. As I attempted to address the violations with McManners, he made continuous attempts to convince me not to follow stated rules and policies… In response to my conviction to follow city and Monona Terrace policies, city ordinances and state law, McManners treated me hostilely and created obstacles to my completion of my job duties.”

McManners declines to comment, writing in an email: “I am comfortable and confident in the city process. I will accept the outcome of the city investigation and the [board's] recommendation.”

Hurtgen worries that people will view her as a disgruntled employee seeking to get rid of her boss. She insists that’s not the case. But she’s also filed a complaint with the state’s Department of Workforce Development’s equal rights division, alleging that McManners has retaliated against her because the complaint.

“I didn’t do anything wrong. I explained policy and my life got more difficult because of it,” she says. “It’s not a personal issue. It’s ‘Hey, department division heads, you need to follow the rules.’”

As detailed by Isthmus in an Aug. 30 article, one of Hurtgen’s complaints is that the Hiebing Group, which provides advertising and marketing services for Monona Terrace, had not gone through a competitive bid process for 17 years. City ordinance requires that projects that exceed $25,000 be put out for a competitive bid. A new software program, Munis, that the city installed in January 2015, made circumventing this requirement difficult.

Exceptions can be made in cases where city officials can demonstrate that only one vendor can reasonably do a job. For instance, if the city paid a company to write software, it makes sense for the same company to get the contract to maintain it.

But Hurtgen questioned whether Hiebing was the only company capable of handling advertising and marketing for the Terrace. “Accounting rules are pretty black and white,” she says. “When you read the description that says this is the only vendor we can get this from — from the get go, I didn’t agree with that.”

Hurtgen refused to fill out the “sole source” justification form that would allow Monona Terrace to avoid putting the project out to bid. Instead, the form was filled out by Bill Zeinemann, associate director of marketing and event services. On it, he argued that Hiebing was justifiable because it saved Monona Terrace “an estimated $26,000 in 2014 alone.”

But Hurtgen finds the logic flawed. “How would you know [the company] is saving you money if you’ve never compared it. We’re basically trusting the vendor,” she says. “You don’t necessarily go out to bid because you’re going to switch vendors, but it gives you something to compare it to.”

Although Zeinemann is mentioned in Hurtgen’s ethics complaint, he is not the subject of it nor has he been accused of any ethics violations. He could not be reached for comment.

The Common Council later approved the one-year $100,000 contract for Hiebing, renewable for up to three years.

Hurtgen has also raised alarm about two contractors that did not submit required affirmative actions plans for contracts of $25,000 or more. The plans are “designed to ensure that the contractor provides equal employment opportunity to all and takes affirmative action in its utilization of applicants and employees who are women, minority or persons with disabilities.”

Hurtgen says the more she raised pointed out city policies, the more she was ostracized by McManners and others at Monona Terrace. She says she worked closely with the city’s purchasing department to clarify what the city policies are.

The reaction from McManners and others was “This is ridiculous that they’re making us do this?” Hurtgen says. “I was agreeing with the wrong side and not the side that says ‘Monona Terrace is different, we’re special.’”

Another concern that Hurtgen raised involves the Friends of Monona Terrace, a nonprofit group that raises money for the convention center. McManners had asked Hurtgen to manage the checkbook for the organization and compile tax information from it.

In his investigation of this complaint, May did not see a problem with this arrangement. “My understanding is that the work done by Ms. Hurtgen is to make and keep track of deposits, to make out a few checks every year and deliver them to the Friends for authorization, and to turn over those records to the Friends for them to do their taxes,” May wrote in his report. “As Finance Director of [Monona Terrace], Ms. Hurtgen should be qualified for these minimal duties, and these do not seem burdensome or outside the range of ‘other duties as assigned’ by a supervisor.”

Hurtgen says May mischaracterizes her complaint — she’s not concerned with her workload, but with a risk to the city. She notes that there’s a recent, clear precedent for how this sort of arrangement can go horribly wrong. In 2006, an employee at Monona Terrace, Angela Roloff, who then kept the Friends of Monona Terrace’s checkbook, was charged with embezzling more than $100,000 from the city and the Friends group. She eventually pleaded no contest to stealing $85,000 and was sentenced to probation.

“I’ve taught accounting. I know about internal controls,” she says. “I know that the person that holds the checkbook should not get the bank statement. I get the bank statement.

“My concern has never been that I can’t handle the checkbook,” she adds. “The city has a risk here and they should know about it. And I can’t believe given the precedent they wouldn’t want to change the procedure.”

May concedes that her concerns about the checkbook might be valid, but he doesn’t believe they relate to ethics.

“That would be something to take up with Monona Terrace or somewhere else within the city to change the system,” he says. “My problem is I couldn’t fit it into the ethics code. I look at most of her concerns and see these are complaints about the management of Monona Terrace. And they might be valid complaints, I don’t know. But they aren’t ethics complaints. At least, I can’t put them in the ethics code.”

The Ethics Board has struggled to determine whether it has jurisdiction to hear this complaint. May and McManners’ attorney, Gregory Everts, have argued that it doesn’t.

But one sticking point for board members has been the ethics code, which states that city officials “shall not exceed their authority or breach the law or ask others to do so, and shall work in full cooperation with others unless prohibited from so doing by law or by officially recognized confidentiality of their work.”

Hurtgen’s complaint alleges that McManners is violating city and state laws. May says that twice before the Ethics Board declined to hear cases alleging a violation of the law. Because of this case, Mayor Paul Soglin proposes to change the ethics code to remove law violations from the board’s oversight.

“I talked to the mayor about it and he said, ‘no, they shouldn’t be hearing those cases,’” May says. “At one of the meetings, one of the members of the board said if they don’t want us hearing those cases, they should put it in the code.”

May says the ethics board isn’t an appropriate body to be determining whether a city employee or official broke the law.

“If you follow it down the slippery slope, if someone gets a parking ticket, you could file a complaint at the Ethics board,” he says. “If it’s not a portion of the code about conflicts of interest or personal profit, then it’s a matter of discipline within the city’s internal system, not something you bring to a board and have them examining whether Mike May properly carried out his duties as city attorney, as opposed to using his role to get a job for his kid.”

However, Hurtgen says she filed the complaint in part because she couldn’t get any city officials to pay attention to her concerns.

“The whole system is frustrating from an employee perspective. When they circle the wagons and protect their own, even ridiculous behavior and disregard for policy and ethics isn’t going to get noticed,” she says. “The Ethics Board has no idea that this has been ignored so many different ways, because I’ve never been allowed to speak. I have a feeling that if they knew more about this, they’d be doing a deeper dive into it.”

Meanwhile, behavior that Hurtgen has complained about appears to persist at Monona Terrace.

In August, officials there attempted to execute a contract with Foxwell Digital, a company that helps clients boost their social media presence. The contract was for $5,000. But when Hurtgen received the request, she told senior officials the amount was at the level that required officials to get at least two other quotes. The project didn’t have to go out to bid, and officials could have picked the most expensive proposal, but they had to at least explore other options.

When Hurtgen notified staff of the city requirement, it was not well received. According to emails obtained by Isthmus through an open records request, Zeinemann wrote to Hurtgen on Aug. 29 “So for the extra $1 we have to get quotes? How about making it $4,999? Can we change the amount? Is that a [purchasing department] question?”

Hurtgen responded the same day: “I guess I don’t understand the difficulty in getting two quotes? Doesn’t anyone in marketing do social media work? I think since the requisition is in the system already it will be quite obvious what your intentions are. Having said that, please do not ask me to approve such actions... This is up to you.”

The purchasing department confirmed the requirement with Zeinemann, the emails show. But rather than get two more quotes — and pay the desired contractor the amount he asked for — Monona Terrace officials asked him to lower his request. The company’s owner, Andrew Foxwell, agreed to lower it to $4,950.